Road to finishing level design (22nd Nov)

In our last workshop we had our game tested, we had very useful/ constructive feedback especially with the layout of our level (at this point the level was still in its blockout stage). The majority of feedback was telling us that the map was to small and had to many dead ends, for which in a game where you are being chased by robots this would cause you to get trapped/blocked in to easily and lose the game . With this information I went ahead and produced a larger and more open level layout, allowing the player multiple routes to escape each room. After doing further play testing as a team with the new layout I got the thumbs up to start making the level. So I started to make the actual map using the asset pack we we chose to use (Sci-Fi Styled Modular Pack [1] )

So then I went about planning how I was going to design each room for its purpose e.g. For the storage room, how was I going to tell the player that this was a storage room, what floor tiles should I use, what wall tiles would be most appropriate for this type of room . All these little things really do affect the created atmosphere. After setting about designing the basic layout of the room (floors, walls, pathways and doors) I went about inserting props into the room, this would play a crucial part in our game, as not only would it fill up the environments and give the rooms life, but it also played a huge part in the flow of the game and the game design as a whole, as the way the props were placed would affect the players navigation around each room and as we were creating a stealth game the props were even more important as they were a way for the player to avoid detection. This meant that when I was designing each room I had to think about how my player would be able to approach each room, giving the player multiple pieces of cover and ways to avoid detection.

After this was all done the final stage was to add lighting into the game, this was where I encountered an issue. Due to the fact that I had stretched quite a few of floor and wall tiles when creating the map, this inevitably meant that a lot of them were overlapping. This is now I realize a bad practice in level design and that every thing should be snapped together not overlapping. One of the issues that can arise from overlapping is called Z-fighting this is where two objects are fighting for the same z axis space will result in constant flicker, as the game would constantly be changing which one of the tiles would be shown/ the player could see. This was the issue with the lighting in our game ,due to a lot of the tiles overlapping the point lights that I added into the game were struggling to know which of the overlapping tiles to shine light on, so the result was a lot flickering light lines on the floors and the walls. To combat this issue I decided to get rid of the internal lighting all together, as going through the whole level making sure each tile was snapped properly would have taken far too much time. So instead I increased the lighting intensity given off by the skybox we had, this wasn’t a perfect solution but did produce a cool red tint effect on the environment and created a spooky feeling along with allowing the player to see properly. With a solution in place with the lighting the last thing for me to do was to add in the game environment functionality e.g. making sure that the door animation would play when the player approached the doors, that all the game objects like keycards and enemies were placed appropriately around the map and to make sure that once the player had the correct keycard, that the corresponding door would open properly.

[1] karboosx, 2018, Sci-Fi Styled Modular Pack, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/sci-fi/sci-fi-styled-modular-pack-82913, Accessed on: Nov 2020.

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